Marks Gallery of Facebook Infractions 1

This is what got me a 3-day suspension.

Facebook comment: If this is how the American experiment ends, it will have ended for the right reason… Experiment concluded: Americans are too stupid to self-govern.

I contested it, but decided not to follow through; I doubt Facebook’s review board cares about nuance like conditional statements. Context was discussion of the risk the US may collapse as a political entity in our lifetimes under autocratic rule.

Facebook has to manage an international social network, and I don’t really expect them to distinguish nuances like punching up versus punching down. I’ve personally never considered it hate speech to suggest that the Founding Fathers who feared mobocracy had legitimate concerns, but I won’t argue that I phrased it poorly in this situation.

Anyway, let this be a lesson to us all: it’s hate speech to suggest that if America collapses into autocracy, it will be because Americans were too stupid to self-govern.

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